The overriding reason to see The Hollow Crown is to
see four great British actors -- Alan Howard, Vanessa Redgrave, Ian Richardson
and Sir Donald Sinden -- onstage together. Beside this, the director is John
Barton, co-founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, who originally wrote this
entertainment in 1960, making the show a unique opportunity to gain some
insight into the reasons the RSC has continued as a touchstone for acting in
English.

The show itself is a trifle, first meant as a one-off
divertissement, that happened to become a popular calling card for the RSC over
the years, assembled from excerpts of plays, poems, diaries, trial transcripts
and chronicles by and about British monarchs from William I to Queen Victoria.
The four actors, books in hand, seated at a table in a bland set, exult in that
great ability nurtured in British dramatic training of conjuring up characters
and images by use of the voice alone. Redgrave is a rivetting Anne Boleyn in
prison and a very funny 15-year-old Jane Austen as she pens her own gleefully
biased English history. Richardson vividly contrasts Charles I and II, the
first struggling to contain his outrage as a court condemns him, the second an
upper-class twit announcing his marriage. Sinden uses his cavernous voice to
great effect as a lubricious Henry VIII and a nearly gaga George III. Howard, a
vocal chameleon, is hilarious as the priggish, Scots-accented James I issuing a
condemnation of tobacco. Joining the actors is Stephen Gray, whose period songs
and ballads often give us a glimpse of the common man.

Wonderful as it is to see these actors, the show is
much like eating a plateful of hors d'oeuvres instead of dinner. At the end you
feel hungry to see a real play.